Archive for the ‘how to have productive sales team meetings’ Category
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
This post brought to you by Meeting to Win.
Subscribe and get a NEW sales team meeting topic every week or visit our STORE for 90+ sales team meeting topics across 21 different categories (see CATALOG HERE).
Create Better Buying Experiences
Stop for a moment and think about the experience your customers have purchasing from you and your company. Do you make it easy and enjoyable or does the work just begin when they say “yes”. The Meeting to Win agenda that went out on Friday is Creating Better Buying Experiences and it leads sales teams through exercises to eliminate bad experiences and create better experiences. We think so often about selling that sometimes we don’t stop to think about what it’s like to buy.
I was sitting with my colleague while she was booking hotel rooms for our team for an upcoming trip. The website she was using limited her to two reservations and she needed three. To get three, you had to call. Well, we were in an office building with poor cell reception and limited time so, what did she do? She went to our second choice and booked three $400/night hotel rooms at the competition. The first choice will never know they missed out on that business, but one buying experience cost them $2,000 that week.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes by calling your own customer service, reviewing invoices, visiting your website and ordering your own products and services. Talk to customers about each interaction they have with your company to learn where they experience frustrations. Get your marketing team in on the project. If you can improve the customer’s buying experience, you can increase sales.
FREE Sales Team Meeting Idea:
As a team, walk through the exercises in this complimentary sales team meeting agenda, Creating Better Buying Experiences. To get agendas like this every week, simply join other successful Sales Managers and subscribe to Meeting to Win.
Tags: motivate sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea
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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Here is a link to the FREE e-book Paul promised and delivered. Enjoy! Thanks to Paul for mentioning Meeting to Win as a helpful resource for sales managers looking to have “meetings that rock“.
Tags: energize sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea
Posted in agenda ideas, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
It’s one of my goals to share great sales meeting ideas and resources with Sales & The City readers. In pursuit of that goal, I point you to Paul Castain’s two-part series, Sales Meetings That Rock.
Check it out here.
Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I always love to share great meeting advice I come across in my reading. Here is some sound advice from Salesopedia’s newsletter this week.
13 Ideas to Run Engaging Meetings
Enjoy!
Tags: energize sales team, meetings, motivate sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting idea
Posted in agenda ideas, communication, how to have productive sales team meetings, meetings, sales management, sales meeting agenda, sales meetings, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics | No Comments »
Monday, May 17th, 2010
Each quarter, Meeting to Win encourages our subscribers to invite a Guest Speaker to their weekly sales team meeting. We’ve updated the list we published in February with more ideas on Guest Speaker options. Invite a Guest Speaker to your next sales meeting and see your team light up.
Wake Up Monday Sales Meetings with Guest Speakers
Subscribe to Meeting to Win weekly sales team meeting agendas and enjoy upcoming topics such as:
Price vs. Value, Deal Makers (Series), Masters of Communication, 13 Critical Success Factors for Salespeople (Series) and many others to keep your team fired up, equipped and winning all year long.
Tags: guest speaker, sales meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meetings
Posted in agenda ideas, agendas, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings, management tips | No Comments »
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
This post brought to you by Meeting to Win.
Subscribe and get a NEW sales team meeting topic every week or visit our STORE for 90+ sales team meeting topics across 21 different categories (see CATALOG HERE).
Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Club
We at Meeting to Win are on a mission to end boring sales team meetings. Boring sales team meetings put sales teams to sleep right at the beginning of the selling week when they should be at their very best. The last thing salespeople should have to do is recover from their sales team meeting so they can be productive each Monday. As part of our mission, we want to share a sales team meeting idea for Sales Managers who share our passion.
Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Clubs
As a team,
Choose a business or sales book from Amazon.com (choose your own or subscribe to Meeting to Win and follow along with our quarterly Sales Performance Book Club – includes Discussion Guide and Chapter Exercises). Cover one or two new chapters each week during your weekly sales team meeting. Assign the chapters to the members of the team. Each week give them 20 minutes of the agenda to lead the team on that chapter’s topic.
They can:
- Lead a discussion on the information in the chapter.
- Ask the team to apply the lessons to their own business.
- Practice skills or ideas from the chapter.
- Pull one or two key lessons from the chapter.
- Set one action item based on the work done during this meeting.
- Get creative – give them the chance to do whatever they want with the chapter. You’ll see a new side of some team members.
Meeting to Win provides Sales Performance Book Club discussions each quarter as part of our Sales Meeting Agenda Subscription. We cover one new book each quarter. Next one, Mind of the Customer, starts in April 2010. Join us by subscribing today.
Join the MISSION TO END BAD SALES TEAM MEETINGS by having motivating sales team meetings that inspire your team to perform. Everyone wins!
Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides Sales Team Meeting Agendas PLUS for Sales Managers who want to lead great sales team meetings.
Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales book club, sales performance, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea
Posted in agenda ideas, agendas, best practice, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings, performance, sales manager tips, sales meeting agenda, sales meetings, sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, team meeting, tips for meetings | No Comments »
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Your products and services – or solutions – meet very important needs of your customers. The more your solutions directly impact their ability to do their business more effectively, the more powerful and important your partnership becomes. Salespeople can hitch their solutions to the most important wagons with a little focus on the right needs.
No matter who you are positioned with in an account, an understanding of the top company goals is useful in the short term and often critical in the long term. In the short term, simply offering a solution they are asking for may be enough to make a sale at a department level. In the long term, much like what we have seen in the past couple of years, spending gets scrutized for one reason or another and any spending not directly tied to the most important goals gets cancelled. Also, salespeople often find themselves in the position of being sold internally by an ally or coach. They have to provide the information and incentive to get their internal ally to fight for their solutions. If that person is armed with the connection to the top goals, the more likely they are to be successful in their interal sales role.
So, we know it’s important, now, how do you do it. Here are some things that you may want to try:
- First of all, start high in an organization. The more effectively you can tie your solutions to their unique company goals, the more likely you are to stay high. Even if you get delegated lower during the process, you still have access higher.
- Research, research, research. Find out everything you can about what the CEO is focused on accomplishing.
- Find out what role your contacts play in the top company goals. For example, pretend your contact is in HR and one of the company’s top goals is the successful launch of a new product for 8% revenue growth this year. How will HR help the company reach this goal? Is it their job to find new sales people? Is it their job to train everyone on the new product? What particular part will they play in this goal? Once you know this you can help them reach their goal which helps the company reach it’s goal.
- Demonstrate how you can help them reach these goals more efficiently. Show how the investment with you gives them the gains they need.
- Once you are in, monitor your contribution and share it in regular reports and communications. Check in often on progress and make sure you stay aligned should the goals get altered.
- Learn to ask questions that get you to the most important goals. You’ll be surprised that often your current contacts actually don’t even know the company’s top goals. You need to learn to ask questions that don’t make them feel stupid yet also help you work toward gathering the necessary information. Simply asking someone “what are your company’s top 3 goals?” may sound like a pop quiz. Use your communication skills to have productive conversations where you both learn if necessary.
Solutions tied to top goals stand the test of time and scrutiny. Get hitched to the right goals for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them “get hitched”, subscribe today.
Tags: CRM, customer meetings, existing customer, motivate sales team, new customers, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda
Posted in Account Management, CRM, communication, efficient, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
I received this article today from my Salesopedia subscription. Two terrifying truths jumped out at me immediately.
- “Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along.”
- “They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.”
Read more about the importance of executing effective sales team meetings in Paul McCord’s article,
Enjoy Paul’s insights and direction and start having better meetings this Monday. It is critically important.
Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea, sales teams
Posted in how to have productive sales team meetings, management tips, sales management, sales manager tips, sales managers, sales meeting agenda | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
(This week’s Meeting to Win focus is on Playing to Win instead of Playing to NOT Lose. Meeting to Win provides a new, fresh sales team meeting agenda every week for our Subscribers. Start having productive sales team meetings that result in superior sales performance with Meeting to Win.)
For some reason, there is often a sense of comfort when a prospective client asks us to do or provide something – see a demo, send me information, etc. We believe we have a solution that may meet their needs and we take their request as a sign that they may also believe that. As sales reps, happy to stay engaged with this prospect, we march off to provide the requested information. This prospective client may very well want this information and have a real plan to evaluate our solution and actually make a go/no-go decision on purchasing from us or not.
On the other hand, they may be making this request for any number of other reasons – and we may be playing along for any number of reasons. Those reasons can include:
- They are too nice to tell you that have no intention of spending a dime with you.
- They are busy and the fastest way to get rid of you is to send you on an errand.
- They are really good at kicking the tires, but have no history of actually buying.
- They stay in the eternal sales cycle never actually moving forward on anything. Professional window shoppers exist in every company.
- They are afraid if they tell you “no” that you will keep trying to sell them. No one enjoys being on the receiving end of this tactic.
- Your pursuit makes them feel important (ugly truth alert!).
- They think they have some power to make this decision. Meanwhile, someone else is actually making the decision at some other level.
- We feel “safe” to simply stay engaged in the sales cycle. We have something to report on our activity tracker, in our pipelines and during our team meeting updates. We’ve bought another week of activity.
- You look so happy when they ask you for something.
Those just a few of the reasons sales reps are asked to run these errands. How do sales reps stop being gophers? One way is to lay out the next few steps or commitments on both sides. Next time you are asked to run an errand, ask what decision they plan to make once you provide the requested information and by when. For example, if they ask to see a demo of your software. Find out what they hope to gain from the demo (the demo may not be what they even need) and what decision they plan to make upon seeing the demo (no-go, take the next step, involve other decision makers, etc) and by when they plan to make the decision (is there even a timeline?).
It feels “safe” to stay engaged and really….it’s a collosal waste of time. Stop playing it “safe” and start helping your clients make decisions that will ultimately help their businesses succeed. Get commitments before you run the errand – everyone wins when you have an efficient process.
(This week’s Meeting to Win focus is on Playing to Win instead of Playing to NOT Lose. Meeting to Win provides a new, fresh sales team meeting agenda every week for our Subscribers. Start having productive sales team meetings that result in superior sales performance with Meeting to Win.)
Tags: CRM, cusotmer meeting success, customer meeting success, energize sales team, sales leadership, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea, sales teams
Posted in CRM, customer meeting, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings, meetings, performance, sales activity, sales management, sales managers, sales meeting agenda, sales meetings, sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, tips for meetings | No Comments »